Zuckerberg: Google+ Means That Social Networks Are the Future

What does Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg think of Google+ and Google's social strategy? Just validation for what he's been saying all along, he said, at the launch of Facebook's video-calling partnership with Skype.

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What does Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg think of Google+ and Google's social strategy? Just validation for what he's been saying all along, he said, at the launch of Facebook's video-calling partnership with Skype.

(Want to know how to get the new features added to your Facebook account? Check out our story.)

With MySpace's implosion, Facebook reigns supreme as the top social network, although LinkedIn's emergence as a jobs network may provide a niche challenger. The weight of Google is behind Google+, however, and though Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook now has over 750 million users, he said the most important component of a social network's growth is the amount of information and data that users are sharing - and that is going up exponentially each year, he added.

In the meantime, however, Zuckerberg has amassed quite a following on Google+, Google's newly released social network. At the event, Zuckerberg was asked what he thought of Hangouts, the video chat feature that's been implemented into Google+, and also his thoughts about Google+ in general.

Hangouts

Within the social messaging space, the rivalry between Google's Google+ Hangouts and the new Facebvook video chat feature boils down to simplicity versus features. Both Zuckerberg and Skype chief executive Tony Bates pitched Facebook's new video calling feature as incredibly simple to use. Google, by contrast, has touted its multiple messaging options, including Hangouts, group video chat of up to 10 users.

"Google has an advantage because Hangouts is a lot more robust," said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst for the Altimeter Group. And, she said, Google also has an advantage because of the robust number of apps that interact with Gmail, which has evolved into its own messaging client with video and text chat, as well as PSTN calling to phones.

"Now Skype is part of Microsoft, and we have an even more longstanding relationship with Microsoft," Zuckerberg said. "But I wouldn't undersell the importance of what we announced today. The vast majority of video chat is one-to-one chat, and this is going to be rolled out to everyone on the Web, and I think that is super awesome."

Zuckerberg also characterized the emergence of Google+ as part of the continued evolution of social networking, as companies hustle to "catch up" with the social trend.

Google+

"I'm not going to say a lot about Google+, as I've only spent a little bit of time on the service," Zuckerberg said. "But in terms of the narrative, as I was saying earlier, where the last five years have been about connecting people, and now that you have the social infrastructure in place a lot of the next five years will be about building these apps. You're going to see a lot of companies who haven't traditionally looked at social networking, not just companies like Google...but there's going to be a lot of apps, lot of companies out there, Netflix is a good example."

Netflix has added a social component before, Zuckerberg said, but the company hasn't done it well. Now, companies will establish hybrid models, where companies try and build their own infrastructure, as well as leveraging other existing ones, he said.

"I view a lot of this as validation as this the the way the next five years are going to play out," Zuckerberg added. "Every app is going to be social, and I think our job is to stay focused and to build the best best value in the world, and if we don't do it someone else will do it."

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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